IN MEMORIAM

IN MEMORIAM

Meditation on the Ceremony of the Sturgeon

To  Dr. Verna Fowler

I sing of fish and rivers, people dark
with winter, light with summer, full of song.
I sit here on the banks beside this man-made lake
and see a time when lakes were not man-made,
when forests covered all this Northern land,
a time when deer and bear were plentiful,
and men and women didn’t have to mourn
the sicknesses that plague our Mother Earth.

In those lost times the white man’s ways were new.
Our people saw them swarm like locust clouds
across the land, their lumber barons felling great
white pines, red oak, elm, maple, beechwood trees
as farmland followed saws and sawmills, plagues that had no end.

Chief Oshkosh led us here.
He heard the white man’s streams of words and saw
how other tribes were forced to move from woods
to plains where trees were miracles
amidst the worlds of grass. He found a place
of stones, woods, water where the white man’s farms
would fail when plows bit soil and found deep stones.
He said, “This is our place,” and then let all
the white man’s storm of words pelt down
like hail upon a massive, unresponsive stone.

Inside this place we made a life that suited us.
We fished for sturgeon in the warming spring
and hunted deer and bear when fall brought maple-fire.
Back then we hadn’t yet become the song
we would become. We heard the wild man walk
beside us in the woods and sometimes saw
the Serpents looking for a man who’d lost
protection from the watchful Thunderbirds.

The Christian God, our Father who art in heaven,
            hallowed be Thy name,

had yet to find the hearts of who we were.
We lived in days and nights protected by
our fathers and the totems of our clans.
We were a glory and a blessing to the earth.

But all things touched by white men change.

Perhaps we should have stayed the way we were.
Perhaps the white men’s ways were wrong for us.
Perhaps we could have kept our Eden sweet with earth.

But once, when sturgeon, dark and large as logs
submerged beneath cold waters of the Wolf,
did not spawn when the sap was in the maple trees,
our people were afraid. What omen from the river’s cold?

Our people prayed. We held the sun upon a pole
as bright with colors as a prism’s light,
and on the pole, no higher than a man,
we hung a sheaf of fresh cut cedar sticks
strung taut with small, symbolic sturgeon nets.
We begged the sun to send the sturgeon up the Wolf.
The fish had come into the Pechetik and Oakatoum.
We said our exhortations, prayed and prayed,
and in our people’s consternation, questioning,
the question ran, What could we do? What could we do?
Without the sturgeon, children, in the winter, starved.

Then, in this time, our Father Andre came,
his cassock dark with Christian faith and life.
He stood beside the river with us, filled
with Christian power, power not from what we were,
and prayed to God to let the sturgeon swim
against the current of the river to the place
where people waited for the life they were.
He had us put the symbol of the sun away
and had us place a crucifix where we had stood
below the shining light of who we’d been.
We honored life back then. We honored life.

And, like a Christian miracle, the sturgeon came
as if they’d heard the priest’s strong voice and saw the cross.
They swam as if no power in the universe
could ever stop their swimming or the song they were.
They came in numbers stunning to the mind.

And when they came, so glorious, alive,
conversion set into the hearts of many clans.
A priest made exhortation to the spirit world.
The sturgeon, powerful and dark, swam up
the great Wolf River to their spawning ground.
That’s how it happened, how we stepped
Into the spirit place where all our people live:
traditional people, Catholics, those who know
no God or spirit living in their lives.

And here I sit beside this man-made lake,
inside the ice and snow of winter’s song,
and know the sturgeon come no longer to these lands.

Why did the sturgeon come just then? I kneel
and say my prayer. Great Creator Spirit, God,
why did the sturgeon come just then?

Taken from Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings: The Tribal College and World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium Poems (Tribal College Press)